Motorsports: Performance coaching for racing drivers

The feeling of winning a race can be described as this intense emotional wave that dominates reality in the “here and now” moment, where we become overwhelmed with joy, pride and a great sense of fulfilment.

Indeed it is a great moment to recognise the glory in such achievement, but also a great opportunity to identify and reflect on the various team’s components that contributed to such success. In his book “ Thinking fast and slow”, Daniel Kahneman identifies success in a simple following equation (Kahneman,2011, p.173):

Success = Talent + Luck

Great success = A little more talent + a lot more luck

One factor for sure we can’t control is “Luck”, we can change our perception of it but we will always be influenced by the randomness of our life’s events. This leaves us “Talent” to work with, and this is where teams push hard to increase their chances of success.

Pushing hard starts from designing the optimal race car for the championship. I still remember my long days, as a vehicle dynamics and suspension design engineer, where we spent countless hours working on finding the optimal design and reaching the best performance.

I also remember my contributions, as a data engineer, in helping the race engineer prepare the car’s setup while admiring the mechanics, during our race at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, seamlessly resolving any problem and keeping 100% focus all the time which is essential for winning an endurance race.

However, designing and preparing the best car is far from being enough to secure victory. The driver is another vital component in the “Talent” category. Race engineers spend many hours training drivers on improving their performance from a technical perspective. This happens by looking at data acquisition and identifying the driver's performance if he is braking early for example or not reaching the maximum speed when compared to previous laps. Vice versa, race engineers rely on drivers’ feedback as a great source of information to adjust the car’s setup and find the best performance.

But even with exceptional drivers, we will sometimes find a mismatch between the engineers’ calculations for the best theoretical car setup and the feedback from the driver.

How to balance engineers' findings with drivers' feedback?

This is where drivers’ coaching for performance comes into play. Going back to “Talent”, It is not restricted to the presence of gifted team members, it also expands to establishing harmony across the whole team from designing the car to winning the race. Talent can be acquired through appropriate performance enhancements to help unlock drivers’ potential. This can be better explained by the following equation from “The inner game of work” (Gallwey, 2001).

Performance = Potential - interference

This simple, yet powerful representation, can illustrate how a driver’s performance will always be compromised by interference which can range from a simple bad mood to self-doubt and fear of failure for example.

As simple as it sounds, such interference, based on its intensity, can easily alter the driver’s perception of his/her reality and feeling about the car’s handling and performance. In return, the driver’s feedback is compromised, therefore unintentionally misleading the race engineer who might end up making compromises on the car’s performance to accommodate the driver.

Coaching can help your team by closing the gap between the car’s performance and the driver’s perception of it. In other words, it is not about increasing your car’s performance per se, it is more about increasing your driver’s performance by reducing interference and establishing clarity in his perception of the car. It overall leads to better harmony between the car’s theoretical performance and the driver’s performance, therefore, helping race engineers make more informed setup decisions.

References

Daniel, K., 2017. Thinking, fast and slow.

Gallwey, W.T., 2001.?The inner game of work: Focus, learning, pleasure, and mobility in the workplace. Random House.